Review

ICO/Marwood at the National Concert Hall in Dublin is reviewed.

Last week the period-instrument players of the Irish Baroque Orchestra made an unaccustomed foray into the music of the classical period. And at the weekend the modern-instrument players of the Irish Chamber Orchestra leaned back into the baroque for a full evening under their new artistic director, violinist Anthony Marwood, for the first time.

The IBO took to Mozart and Myslivecek with a sharpness which at times amounted to vehemence. The ICO, tackling Bach, Purcell, Handel, Locatelli and Rameau, sounded at all times more svelte, more self-consciously civilised in manner, more concerned to observe the niceties of elegance and refinement in tone production. Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the ICO descended into a realm of easy-listening blandness. At the opening of the evening, their handling of the six-part Ricercar from Bach's Musical Offering (the one that Webern so strikingly orchestrated with 20th-century sensibility) was anything but routine or predictable.

Marwood directed this with a tinge of austerity, sparing of vibrato and contained in expression, so that the awe-inspiring complexity of the musical construction could communicate with maximum clarity.

And he began the second half of the evening with another astonishing display of contrapuntal wizardry in a selection of Purcell's Fantazias and In Nomines, pieces originally conceived for viols. Here, however, the players did not always seem able to capture the full reach of the composer's astonishing, sometimes dizzying harmonic adventures.

In Handel's Concerto Grosso in B minor, Op. 6 No. 12, and Locatelli's Op. 7 No. 6 (Il Pianto d'Arianna) there was a kind of middle-ground mapped out, the cut-and-thrust that period instruments players favour in this repertoire serving as a reference, as a background that was appreciated, but never fully indulged. In this regard, the best of Nicholas McGegan's baroque performances when he was music director of the ICO had a greater bite than Marwood here achieved.

That bite did, however, materialise in the closing work, a suite from Rameau's 1739 opera Dardanus, where the vitality and imagination of the string playing were every bit as engaging as they had earlier been in Bach's Violin Concerto in E, with Marwood himself as the energised soloist.